Marta’s body is wracked with tuberculosis, an opportunistic disease that strikes many suffering from AIDS.  Her adult daughter has AIDS, and at least one of the grandchildren has tested positive.

In nearby Etale, a gaggle of preschoolers wait patiently in line to receive a piece of bread and a cup of juice at St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s Anglican Church.  Some wear heavy jackets to ward off the relative cold. Others dig their callused feet and bare toes into the dry, sandy soil.

The church’s program for AIDS orphans and other vulnerable children 3 to 6 years old provides beginning education skills for 40 children, but only can afford to feed them once a week.  There are 70 children here today.

Near Cape Town, South Africa, Olga describes how the Mzamomhle Beading Group to which she belongs helps to relieve some of her emotional stress that comes from living with AIDS.  What she earns from beading sparkling red-ribbon badges, bracelets and necklaces helps to provide food, shelter and the insurance she will need to be buried when she dies. She is 32.

At the invitation of Episcopal Relief and Development, five women who are actively involved in their dioceses traveled to Namibia and South Africa for 12 days in July to meet the people most affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The group, escorted by Brian Sellers-Petersen, ERD’s director of West Coast operations and local diocesan leaders, visited ERD and Anglican Church programs that respond to poverty and HIV/AIDS in the region.

Marta, Olga and the children are beneficiaries of these programs. ERD's partnership with the Church of the Province of Southern Africa marked one of its first steps in moving from a granting organization to focusing on long term development.

“The more than $200,000 we have committed in Southern Africa was a response to the priorities and needs of our partners,” said Janette O’Neill, ERD’s program director for Africa. “We are also very involved in planning, evaluation, mentoring and staff support.”

The Episcopal agency’s multi-year commitment has allowed a program of growth and expansion of HOPE Africa, a social development office of the Diocese of Cape Town, with the budget meeting the needs of a growing organization that has shifted considerably over the past four years, as well as supporting HIV/AIDS work in the dioceses of Namibia and Johannesburg.

In the Diocese of Namibia, the church provides the structure and training to respond to the devastating toll of HIV/AIDS and poverty.  Odibo, a dusty, bleak town on the Angolan border, surrounds St. Mary’s Health Center that provides inpatient and outpatient care, plus training and supplies for home-based HIV/AIDS care workers.

Its program coordinator, Pelita Haimbodi, is a registered nurse. Volunteers attend week-long training to learn nutrition, hygiene and wound care and then often walk, or ride a bicycle, 15 miles to visit their eight to 14 patients. With simplified antiretroviral regimens now available at affordable costs, grassroots groups can be extremely effective in treating patients and providing counseling, while they assess other issues critical to a patient’s well being.  It is a holistic approach to treating this disease that affects one in four people in Namibia.

HOPE Africa, founded in 1996, provides a dynamic and holistic model for community development, empowering participants while delivering a wide range of programs and training.

Among its projects is the six-member beading group to which Olga belongs.  She is also a trained HIV/AIDS counselor for her peers.
HOPE Africa has an annual project expenditure of more than $383,000, of which more than one-third is provided by ERD.  HOPE Africa’s executive director, Delene Mark, believes the church is best positioned to deliver training and programs to the underserved population.
In every community, she said, “there is a trained minister, a building, a vehicle, an office and a telephone and fax.  That’s our muscle.”

HOPE Africa supports such diverse projects as computer skills classes, a marimba band that keeps children occupied and off the streets, a quilting project that employs 37 women, a hospice home for AIDS patients and numerous projects in a historic fishing village, Arniston, on the Western Cape.
 
Perched at the edge of the turquoise and royal blue surf of the Indian Ocean, the stone cottages are painted pure white and topped with fairytale thatched roofs. The beauty of the scene, so different from the sandy bush of northern Namibia or the squalid informal settlements of Cape Town, belies the hardships and poverty of the local population.

The sun, setting at the tip of this vast continent, sends golden and orange rays of light across the darkening sky, illuminating the hopes and dreams of the poor and afflicted in this part of the Anglican Communion.  Episcopal Relief and Development,  in cooperation with the diocese of Namibia and Cape Town, has turned victims into partners, providing dignity to all. 

For further information and reflections written by the participants, visit: www.er-d.org/africapilgrimage.htm